- Sometimes a parent will bring in a child – natal, adopted, foster, etc. — who functions well enough in school and in public, but who has recurrent rages toward the parent at home. Rages only at home, and only at this parent.
- The parent is typically a very nice and kind parent – undeserving of any violent treatment (assuming anyone anywhere is deserving of violent treatment.) So the parent is mystified. “What’s going on? She needs help!”
- A case example walked into my office in Ontario soon after I finished graduate school. A single father complained about his nine year-old daughter. “Sometimes she is fine, but suddenly she’ll be frustrated or upset by some little thing, and she starts attacking me or trying to break something precious to me! I feel so helpless. Why does she do that!?”
- Does she say anything? I asked.
- “Mostly just screaming. Sometimes she’ll say odd things like, “I don’t deserve to be in this family!” or “You hate me!” or “I hate you!” or “You don’t love me!” What should I do!?
- This question, “What should I do!?” is a red flag for most psychodynamic therapists. We know so well that our goal is not to give advice but to help reflect, help with process. However “What should I do?!” is one of my professional weaknesses.
- Too often I head off into advices:
- Try to not reassure, but give Empathy for how she must be feeling….“I tried that.”
- …and be in charge of yourself so there are not TWO dysregulated people in the room…
- “I did that.”
- ….and remember that the more you want to get away from her, the more she needs you nearby….
- “I remembered that.”
- …..
- Finally I heard myself rattling off ‘advice’ to an emotionally exhausted parent who needed my empathy for himself – my empathy for how he was feeling, my empathy for how hard he was trying, and my empathy for his own unresolved past traumas.
- I apologized.
- Beginning with the last item, this father’s own traumatic past left him determined to keep things positive for his own child. He dealt with his despair by disallowing any ambivalent feelings of his own such as resentment, until it burst and he would lash out verbally, after which he felt horrible.
- Thus when he felt frustrated at his child’s blind, out-of-control behavior, he would bury his frustration so that it came out sideways – tearful pleadings with his daughter to “Tell me what’s wrong so I can help you!!” and “What is it you want!?”
- And when she of course could not explain herself on a conscious level, but kept expressing her sense of shame and worthlessness preverbally and violently, he would eventually blow up in exasperation, desperately wanting to help.
- This explosion would leave him burdened with shame and fear that he had wounded his child. However it sometimes had the paradoxical effect of calming his child. At last she could finally see in this repressed father some real feelings she could trust.
- I now had a helpful map of their double-bind. In a double-bind, people are stuck in a dilemma: feeling bad if they act, and equally bad if they do nothing. Lose-lose, what do you choose?
- Father could try to be direct about his own anger and resentment, but then would beat himself up for expressing negative feelings to a child, his suffering daughter no less. Or he could keep repressing his own resentments and continue to feel unable to connect to her in her own struggles.
- The daughter was also in a double bind: When I get scared that I’m not lovable, my dad doesn’t get it and wants me to explain it and tell him what I need. But I have no idea how to articulate that stuff – I’m just a kid! — so my sense of being not good enough increases….(begin again)….
- Finally, as the therapist, I also enter the double bind (though I am the one who can best reflect productively on the experience of being there.) Heck, I offered this father my best ideas and advice, yet was repeatedly dismissed with “I tried that.”
- Rather than start arguing with father about whether or not he ‘tried that’ the proper way, my path forward is to recognize my privileged position. I am experiencing what the father AND his daughter experience – frustration, helplessness, hopelessness and the resentment at doing ones best and receiving no results, appreciation or recognition. If my ‘best’ was not good enough for father, perhaps I am not good enough.
- When I can reflect on this, perhaps right away or later in clinical consultation, I feel honored to have been allowed to experience their stuck system for myself. I am grateful for an inside view of the emotional challenge which faces father: to find a way to tolerate standing with old intolerable feelings and reflecting from that place until it is safe for his daughter to recognize her own feelings in him, allowing her to sense (over time) that there is less need to maintain the fierce, defensive walls between them.
- This is the therapeutic potential of allowing ourselves to sit inside any client’s paralyzing double-bind. Just not for too long.
